A project from Imperial College in London puts together whole video games …

Her name is Angelina: she runs on a heavy-duty Mac server and she's building some addictive computer games for you.

Angelina (a tail-recursive acronym for "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named ANGELINA") is a project in evolutionary computing by Michael Cook, a PhD candidate at Imperial College in the UK. Angelina generates computer games from scratch. It arrives at a final product by breaking down the important elements of a game into sub-tasks called "species," which together form a whole game. While auto-generating portions of videogames is nothing new to the medium, Angelina expands on the concept to almost fully-automate game development.

Cook says his "labrat" has created many games (sometimes at the rate of one game every ten minutes), and you can play some "Games by Angelina" here. While not all of Angelina's spawn have been worthwhile or playable, the few that you can play on Cook's site are pretty clever (especially for a machine).

According to a 2012 paper by Cook (PDF), the Angelina system draws on three species that evolve independently to create games. The first species, maps, determines "passable and impassable areas." Layouts specifies the different entities in the world and the game player, and then rulesets defines the way the player's obstacles will move. Angelina puts those categories together, then simulates a human playing the game 400 times to find glitches and problem areas that don't work to cast aside. During these trials, Angelina also finds retaining levels that are considered "fun": things that pose a challenge but then get easier. The most successful species are the ones that cooperate best with other species, so when those get grafted together you have a game by Angelina.

Cook points out this process is evolution, not learning. "Just like evolution in nature, the process isn't really conscious of the overall direction it's moving in. At each step, Angelina has a set of games to consider, and all it has to do is choose the best of this set, and combine their features together to make a new set," Cook said in an email. Unlike, say, IBM's Watson, every time Angelina wants to create a new game, the system has to start from scratch again.

Naturally, these kind of procedurally generated games aren't on par with the beautiful, rambling shooters and MMOs of today. And it should be noted that Angelina isn't totally autonomous. She can set all the parameters, but a human still has to create the graphics and music that go with the game. But the games this system spits out are interesting enough to hook the attention of someone playing on a mobile phone and looking for a quick experience with a little bit of challenge. The current games on Cook's site resemble early arcade games and Metroidvania-style 2D games. "I've beaten all of Angelina's games, except the ones which were impossible to finish," Cook said. "They're quite tiny, and creating games with a good difficulty level isn't Angelina's strong suit right now. I'm looking to that in a future project, however."

While Angelina is designed purely for games, the concepts being executed are important to AI in general. Imperial College's Computational Creativity Group, which houses Cook's project, studies how "automating reasoning processes" can influence pure mathematics, graphic design, and the visual arts. For now though, Cook hopes to get indie game developers using Angelina-type programs for their own creations.

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The santa claus game was NOT designed by Angelina. The screenshot comment is wrong, fix it.It was created by Cook for whatever reason, 100% man-made, no future skynet involved.

This is true! I put this together myself partly as an experiment to show the difference between a human design and an AI design using the same constraints. I released it as a 'thankyou' to the people who had taken part in a survey - apologies for making the site a bit confusing.

Part of me is sitting here thinking "that's pretty cool" and the other part is laughing at the mental image I've got of a bunch of game developers screaming "Don't give the publishers ideas to replace us!!!"

Part of me is sitting here thinking "that's pretty cool" and the other part is laughing at the mental image I've got of a bunch of game developers screaming "Don't give the publishers ideas to replace us!!!"

I could see this happening in 10-20 years time. Well I guess it'll be goodbye job time.Interestingly enough this will create new job openings for people who are masters / doctors in Mathematics, Physics and CS; thus increasing the minimum qualified individual's study requirements to a level comparable with M.D ( 6+ years of higher education ).

Part of me is sitting here thinking "that's pretty cool" and the other part is laughing at the mental image I've got of a bunch of game developers screaming "Don't give the publishers ideas to replace us!!!"

If you understand what Angelina does, you understand that only the level designers and balancers are at risk.

Part of me is sitting here thinking "that's pretty cool" and the other part is laughing at the mental image I've got of a bunch of game developers screaming "Don't give the publishers ideas to replace us!!!"

If you understand what Angelina does, you understand that only the level designers and balancers are at risk.

For now

I'm only half serious, but there must be business people salivating over a system like this, the ability to "do away" with all those "artist types". Not saying all, or even most, business people are like that, but they exist, because I've worked with them, and they'd sell their own grandmother (assuming they haven't already) for a system like this.

This is true! I put this together myself partly as an experiment to show the difference between a human design and an AI design using the same constraints. I released it as a 'thankyou' to the people who had taken part in a survey - apologies for making the site a bit confusing.

Part of me is sitting here thinking "that's pretty cool" and the other part is laughing at the mental image I've got of a bunch of game developers screaming "Don't give the publishers ideas to replace us!!!"

If you understand what Angelina does, you understand that only the level designers and balancers are at risk.

For now

I'm only half serious, but there must be business people salivating over a system like this, the ability to "do away" with all those "artist types". Not saying all, or even most, business people are like that, but they exist, because I've worked with them, and they'd sell their own grandmother (assuming they haven't already) for a system like this.

Frankly, the more that game balance can be automated, the better. Humans do a TERRIBLE job at it from what I've seen (and I'd love to see a PhD candidate tackle that one - game balance across the last 20 years of gaming, pros/cons, and how to "fix" it). When you've got entire cadres of developers at, say, Blizzard, constantly balancing and rebalancing various game systems it is PAINFULLY obvious that either (1) they have NO CLUE what they're doing, (2) they are intentionally creating imbalances for some motivation or another, or (3) they have NO CLUE what they're doing. Same goes for the majority of MMOs out there, IMO (and in the opinion of the masses, although I don't want to go down the appeal route there).

The fact that large masses of people interacting on an MMO forum tend toward coming up with (1) good solutions (2) faster than a game's developers (3) that then get implemented by the game's devs is a sure sign that this stuff could benefit greatly from the application of automation-by-AI.

What considerations have you given to expanding on this implementation of ANGELINA?

Could it (she?) gather data while users play, and then use that data to improve on game quality, for example?

Hi there!

There are other people working in the research group on adaptive games - games which watch you as you play, gather data, and then redesign the existing game to fit perceived preferences (for some value of 'redesign'). It's a very challenging area, and hard to make progress in, but there are definitely people looking at it.

At the moment, I don't have any intention to move along those lines, as I prefer the idea of ANGELINA being a designer who releases games like a human would. Once you put the game out there, it's a static thing that people can play but that can't be easily changed. That said, I have considered the idea of ANGELINA playtesting ideas on humans during the design process, and using the feedback to alter the game currently being designed.

Right now, I'm looking at smaller steps. Two big themes in 2012 for ANGELINA will be learning how to judge difficulty, and flexing her creative muscles in terms of visual theming. I don't want to be drawing for ANGELINA forever!

I wrote a long response to the other posts, but it got mangled by the flood filter! Sorry folks.

In short - game balance is a tricky business. Research has shown in the past (or indicated, at the very least) that mathematically balanced games may not seem balanced to the players. It all comes down to aesthetics and how the game feels. That's a tricky business.

As for just being a level designer - ANGELINA's a little better than that, but not far off. Hopefully her skills will grow, but I truly believe that the future will lead to researchers creating tools that make humans better at making games, rather than replacing them entirely. That said, if ANGELINA can create a game that someone really, genuinely enjoys one day, that'd make me very happy indeed.

I foresee that the fruits of this projects (and others like it) will be a nail in the coffin of the 'information economy'. There won't be many avenues left for people to find work soon. It started a long time ago, well before any of us were born, when machines replaced people in industry and the Luddites attacked the machinery that was putting them out of work. We're going to see this in our life times and it's going to happen to us. Then all the oil will run out and people will suddenly find jobs again.

I foresee that the fruits of this projects (and others like it) will be a nail in the coffin of the 'information economy'. There won't be many avenues left for people to find work soon. It started a long time ago, well before any of us were born, when machines replaced people in industry and the Luddites attacked the machinery that was putting them out of work. We're going to see this in our life times and it's going to happen to us. Then all the oil will run out and people will suddenly find jobs again.

Haha. Look at it this way - photoshop has allowed people to do amazing things with art. Yet we still appreciate human art as much as ever, and we now have skilled people trained in using photoshop and pushing the technology to its very limits.

I'm sure the same will be true of the next generation of software as well. For all its autonomy, ANGELINA is still stronger when coupled with a human who knows how to use it properly.

Haha. Look at it this way - photoshop has allowed people to do amazing things with art. Yet we still appreciate human art as much as ever, and we now have skilled people trained in using photoshop and pushing the technology to its very limits.

When somebody invents an evolutionary process to design pleasing graphics, perhaps you can feed it some source images or keywords for it analyse and start to assign 'fitness' values to, add in the magic of some fuzzy logic and it can rapidly iterate pleasing designs far quicker and more cheaply than hiring a designer and ... there go your designer jobs too.

This isn't remotely like having a tool which creates jobs; this is removing the human from the equation.

There are already electronics, designed by evolutionary algorithms, that no human knows how they work [edit-> clarity here: it's the resulting designs which are puzzling not the evolutionary algorithms], but they do work. There was one I read about a few years ago that processed sound, an audio filter. It had an extra element that the machine determined had to be there; when the people who built it removed that circuitry (which went literally to nothing) it stopped working. So they left it in. Chip designers watch out.

This isn't remotely like having a tool which creates jobs; this is removing the human from the equation.

In your example, someone must still act as a fitness function. Someone must still supply the fitness requirement that says "this is what this game should be like".

A second issue, one closer to the indie dev side of my heart, is this: I will always want to buy games by Edmund McMillen or Derek Yu. There is something about their personal touch to a game that makes me interested in it. Like art aficionados, many of us see the human influence on a game design and that adds value to the games that we play.

Might a game like Battlefield 4 be improved using this kind of tech? Sure. Of course. Blockbusters tend to be mostly about calculated design choices and obvious functions to maximise. But will I be interested in an AI-written point-and-click game over a Double Fine creation? You're damn right I won't be. I'd be curious about both, of course, but Tim Schafer is a part of my videogames history and its present culture.

Even if we have AI that produce games that rival or supercede human creations, they will not be human. They will be a different kind of game design, one that we appreciate, but do not necessarily prefer.

In your example, someone must still act as a fitness function. Someone must still supply the fitness requirement that says "this is what this game should be like".

That someone is called the client, who does that now, specifying what they want another person to create for them. Only they'll be doing it with software instead of a person.

Quote:

A second issue, one closer to the indie dev side of my heart, is this: I will always want to buy games by Edmund McMillen or Derek Yu. There is something about their personal touch to a game that makes me interested in it. Like art aficionados, many of us see the human influence on a game design and that adds value to the games that we play.

I commend that attitude, but look at our world today. Skilled craftsmen still exist but are in short supply _despite_ their works being preferred by the vast majority of people. Money is what determines this. A cheap service that does the job... cheap because it is automated... will lead to job losses. Just look at history and you'll understand the forces at play.

As graduate student also working on AI (my work focuses on the use of language in multi-agent systems), I have to say that any researcher in the field has to be comfortable with the idea of making humanity obsolete :-P

Anyway, I have a question for Micheal, the article didn't exactly mention this, but what is the knowledge in computer science that your project is trying to push forward?

As graduate student also working on AI (my work focuses on the use of language in multi-agent systems), I have to say that any researcher in the field has to be comfortable with the idea of making humanity obsolete :-P

Anyway, I have a question for Micheal, the article didn't exactly mention this, but what is the knowledge in computer science that your project is trying to push forward?

Hey!

I touch on a few areas. One, I hope that my work might lead to advances in evolutionary computation theory. That used to be the main thrust of the PhD until we found prior research that included a lot of our contributions. PhD-itis strikes again.

Second is the general field of computational creativity. Artistic expression through videogames is something that we find hard to talk about even when humans are doing it, but it's something I'd like ANGELINA to tackle too once we're more confident in game design.

Third is more of an applications area, but improving and streamlining the process of game design and development through the creation of better tools and a better understanding of the design process.

When you say the use of language, are you working in computational linguistics? I love those guys.

kingius wrote:

I commend that attitude, but look at our world today. Skilled craftsmen still exist but are in short supply _despite_ their works being preferred by the vast majority of people. Money is what determines this. A cheap service that does the job... cheap because it is automated... will lead to job losses. Just look at history and you'll understand the forces at play.

Well. Well. Potentially. But another way of looking at it is the indie market in modern PC games. Why does RPS and its ilk feel so disparaging towards Modern Warfare? Because they don't like the generic, seen-it-before feel to it. Whereas they deeply appreciate the bizzare content of 'punk' indie games, or thoughtful narratives like To The Moon. I did like Ganso's quote about being comfortable with making humanity obsolete. But I do have a soft spot for humans. Deep down.

Thanks for the answer Micheal, as for our work, yea it's computational linguistics, we are exploring a new model of language evolution and are using multi-agent systems for experiments.

This sounds great. Almost everything I know about Computational Linguistics I learnt through Dinosaur Comics (qwantz.com) but still! I have a huge respect for you guys. I was going to work with linguistics people early in my PhD (I was looking at opinion mining/sentiment analysis) but I changed course to the games stuff.

As graduate student also working on AI (my work focuses on the use of language in multi-agent systems), I have to say that any researcher in the field has to be comfortable with the idea of making humanity obsolete :-P

Yes of course you are, because you don't think it will affect you personally. But it will. The forces you are playing with have the potential to put you out of a job too... and they will, because machines never sleep and are cheap to run. We all know about Moore's Law and the inevitable march of computing power. I highly recommend putting your energies into something that will benefit people by _creating_ jobs instead of expanding the capabilities of machines to replace people in work. We have mass unemployment problems as it is. How about putting your considerable intellects to a _real_ problem like how to create tools that create more jobs, which really will benefit us all, instead of the 'challenges' of AI which are imaginary at best, and are to the detriment of us all? Look to your hearts and turn your minds to the common good. This is what the world needs, what people need.

Even if we have AI that produce games that rival or supercede human creations, they will not be human. They will be a different kind of game design, one that we appreciate, but do not necessarily prefer.

Have you considered the possibility of evolving the design of a gameworld's map based upon the observed psychology of the player's alter ego? This would result in Open World games that adapted their challenges to suit the taste of the player. There would be little to no pre-scripted content and what there was would be used to create generic micro dramas with contextually varying seed parameters.

However, the goal of true Generative Narrative depends on encouraging the player to stay "in role". You only have to look at how GTA IV allows players to ignore the (pre-scripted) Campaign and "muck around" to see that game developers will need to penalise players who act out of character and ruin their generative plots. It seems obvious to me that this medium needs to move beyond GAME OVER and reward the player for how well they role play with 'Kudos' points: this then makes each generative narrative into a meta game played to increase Kudos which will then unlock another character to role play of greater subtlety and sophistication. It will then be viable to have stories emerge of heroic sacrifice (where the normal instinct is to stay alive at all costs to witness all the content you paid for - instead, you get infinite unfolding content refreshed through the lenses of multiple character perspectives; perhaps, next go you play as a Dorian Gray / Faust style villian).

NPCs would offer you a choice of alternatives which would narrow in focus over time to discourage acting out of character insofar as your alter ego had been ascertained. The avoidance of actions that would not yield a high Kudos score may prove to be enough to ensure that the player didn't "get bored" and "muck about" only to complain about the "poor pacing" and "lack of immediate drama". That the initial playthrough resonated with the psychology of the player's alter ego would also help bind them to the Generative Narrative. Other NPC AIs would operate largely "off stage" and be more interested in each other than your character, until it became apparent to them that they could make use of your talents, or that they should eliminate you as a threat, etc. based upon the indirect "fog of war" style reports of henchmen. It would be possible to infiltrate and subvert these organisations, or set one against another whilst being the "gun for hire", this is where the drama would be Generated.

Yet, this is still not quite enough for Art.

There is no shape, no cathartic climax, just a recipe for Soap Opera porridge...

What is needed is the assertion by a subtly cheating game engine of a pervasive underlying Theme. Stories are antiludological, closing the space of possibilities that attracts players to this unique medium. Freedom to act out our desires and test the boundaries and rules of an imagined world compels us to exploratory play. A system that proferred the infinite choice of an Open World, but then made us face the consequences of our actions by binding our alter ego to continuing on a path (of redemption / heroism / revenge / greed / true love) and then "funneling" us into narrower sets of choices that compensated for their diminishing of total freedom by building upon the choices we had willingly expressed earlier on - in essence, allowing us to write our own stories through our deeds.

Take a step back and you will see how the novelist seeks to convey a theme through a story. The key point here is that the exact details of the story don't matter to the artistic endeavour as much as appropriateness of technique, pacing, drama, believable characterisation, avoidance of deus ex machina devices, binding the protagonist to their desire, demonstrating that by having the "object" of their desire made inaccessable via the placement of obstacles (status / geography / strategy), releasing them from their frustration during some kind of foreshadowed cathartic climax-resolution which also completes their character arc by showing that they have been changed by their experiences and the repeatedly resurfacing motif of the theme. Nowhere in that long list of things to expect in a story is "the story" - all of these qualities are independent to the details of who, what, when and how which is where Generative Narrative and some kind of set-dressing AI like your evolutionary Angelina software come in.

Need an ad hoc map for an impromptu shoot-out? As indicated by the Thematic "Director" and informed by the states of the NPC AIs in the Generative Narrative "Simulation". Then, by all means ask Angelina...

'it is PAINFULLY obvious that either (1) they have NO CLUE what they're doing,'...

Blizzard and likely just about every serious games company will already use massive amounts of simulations and heuristic based adjustment to balance every element of the game. Its part of basic games development. They have more than a small clue as to what they are doing and you _grossly_ underestimate both the difficulty of the task and a humans capacity for screwing it all up.

This is closer to solving Go than it is to solving Chess. The number of elements, combinations of tactics, manoeuvres, and entirely random insanity that has to be dealt with is staggering even after its heavily pinned down with an extensive set of heuristics. (Which is a hugely complex task in itself)

So yeah thousands of gaming humans, each with a brain capable of dealing with these problems orders of magnitude faster than any super computer on Earth, do manage to provide balancing feedback to even the most stringent of developers like the Blizzard testing team are. This really shouldnt come as a surprise to anyone.

'it is PAINFULLY obvious that either (1) they have NO CLUE what they're doing,'...

Blizzard and likely just about every serious games company will already use massive amounts of simulations and heuristic based adjustment to balance every element of the game. Its part of basic games development. They have more than a small clue as to what they are doing and you _grossly_ underestimate both the difficulty of the task and a humans capacity for screwing it all up.

This is true. Blizzard do a huge amount of work, and a lot of it is old-fashioned human-powered stuff because they know it produces reliable results. That said, genetic algorithms did find weaknesses in the balancing and produce unstoppable build orders - one can only assume they now use this to reverse engineer such problems before they happen.

Regarding Go - contemporary research very nearly has this problem nailed! We'll need to find another example when we want to reference a hard AI problem now.

tjukken: It probably should be! But the scientific community isn't that hot on non-sentient AIs presenting their own papers just yet, so I stick to the old impersonal third-person tense when writing papers still.

It's astounding to me how so many people that seem intelligent in a computer realm can have no grasp of economics. Our unemployment rate set record lows in the 90's and was regularly much higher before all the "replacing" machines. When a machine does a given task faster or cheaper than a human, the price of that good falls and availability increases. The end result is that the unit purchases increase but the total investment in that good typically decreases (you are getting more for less and pick a compromise position between taking all the gains in getting more versus paying less) . This increases demand for every other good in the economy, alone this would simply result in a net identical number of jobs. The second effect is if this happens over and over the price of many things goes down, making it seem like salaries went up, (inflation makes this seem to be an increase in salaries rather than a decrease in price), that is that the price of cloths has gone up in $ terms in the past hundred years, but compared to salaries we pay a much smaller portion of our incomes for many more outfits in modern times). Because salaries are now higher in a relative sense for everything, jobs that didn't exist because the produced output less valuable then their costs, are now valuable, this second effect results in net job creation. (in jobs that appear low end at first, but as long as new stuff is invented all jobs eventually pay more and more, though this "pie" can be split unevenly based many factors that are worth a far longer post)So in the end ANGELINA can only ever create more jobs.

LOL. What utter and ridiculous nonsense not even worth quoting. You talk like this actually has a chance of "takin' our jobs!" And that humanity isn't progressed when we make baby steps with Artificial Intelligence. You talk like Americans losing jobs is the only pressing issue in the world.

Japan and South Korea have different problems - an aging population and slowed population growth. They're choosing to assist that aging population with the technology we have and advancing robotics & exoskeletal tech and AI at the same time by leaps and bounds (the rivalry between the nations is sparking a TON of innovation). But that doesn't help starving people in Africa, so who cares right?

Automated game content generation goes back a VERY long time in gaming, but usually constrained to within a single game. This broadens that category to game design generation. But the brains behind this is very quick to point out, that hand tuning is still required to make a lot of what ANGELINA makes enjoyable on a mainstream-audience kind of level. If anything AI advancements like ANGELINA will lower the bar for high-end independent video game design and development, increasing innovation within the entire gaming culture.

And it has been noted elsewhere that Video games are just one side of a coin - scientific research and simulation are the other side.

You also seem to forget that humans are still superior to computers when it comes to writing code for computers. That likely won't change within my lifetime, despite all the advancements in AI. I forget what the term is for a tool that is used to make other tools of the same kind - a swiss army knife with a tool for making swiss army knives for example. We're not there in software yet (although that field tends to get advanced more by virus and malware authors).